It's a pretty simple deal on the racers side from what I've heard from Biondo. Essentially, the tree works the same as before. You launch off your top or bottom or whatever and the light goes green regardless for the slower driver.

Then after the faster driver launches if appropriate, one of the reds will light up. The worse red loses every time rather than first red.

With True Start gone are the days of a 10 second car redlighting the race away with a -.001 where the 7 second car goes -.010. In that case, the 10 second car wins.

They ran it at the big buck races this year that Biondo put on. In the end, it had little effect on the outcomes because in all reality how many times do both go red? If there were to be a race where it would affect, the million dollar races would be it because I'm sure everyone was extra tight on their delay boxes.

I like the idea odf it because it should be the worse redlight. The pro tree guys are afforded the worse because the tree comes down at the same time, but the full tree bracket guys have always had the situation where the slower car loses if they go red.

TruStart is LONG overdue. The Christmas Tree will now be the same as the break-out rules. Worst offender loses both situations.

This has been debated for the better part of the last decade. And, 90+% of the time, the argument(s) are the same: The quicker cars in a given Class hate it, and the slower cars are all for it. Reason(s) are, the slow(er) cars get a fair shake now that they did not before. The quick(er) cars hate it, because they are losing the unfair advantage that was in their favor. And they always have the same reason: "Well, it's been that way for over thirty years, blah, blah blah..." No quicker cars can come up with a well thought out, intelligent reason to keep things the way they are, other than '"it's been like that forever". The break-out rule used to DQ the FIRST offender. They (NHRA) realized it was unfair, and changed the breakout to the WORST offender. But the Tree was the 'first red loses' forever--until now. And I applaud Peter, Kyle, and Mr. Brockmeyer for developing the TruStart software to be used.